There have been recent technological advances in bioanalytical science and bioengineering which have influenced many research areas such as flow cytometry, gene profiling, and clinical diagnostics. Among those, the development of genomics and proteomics generate a great deal of sequence data, therefore there is a need to develop new technologies to rapidly screen a large number of nucleic acids and proteins. Optical encoding provides a promising way to enable high throughput analysis. In a wavelength-and-intensity multiplexing, the number of codes increases exponentially with increasing number of color and intensity levels. A 3-color/10-intensity scheme yields approximately 1000 codes, whereas a 6-color/10-intensity scheme has a theoretical coding capacity of about one million. However, a major problem with the encoding approach is that no reliable technologies are currently available for massively parallel coding on the nanometer scale.
There is a need to provide improved compositions, systems, and methods for optical encoding. The present disclosure addresses this need and more.